I’ve played poker for play money. There’s not as much pain when losing so there is correspondingly less motivation to exercise discipline, come to correct beliefs, or deal seriously with the difficult psychological situations. Learning to take those things seriously and perform under “survival instinct”-level pressure is the point of this training. You want the actions you take to imprint your habits and reshape them to be more rational over time and play money can’t do that. See the post I linked to above for a longer explanation.
The football study you link to shows me that in cases where there’s already a rich information market, real and pretend markets both mirror it well. That doesn’t indicate to me that people wagering in the play money markets had a similar visceral experience or would learn the same lessons from failure or success. I strongly suspect they didn’t—and would bet money on it if I could figure out how.
Playing poker for play chips online quickly teaches that there’s a huge difference between $0.01 and $0.00 when it comes to quality of play. Games that don’t require something be risked end up being jokes.
I think there’s a place for it—A few months ago I didn’t know anything about poker except the relative values of the hands. Then I got a free iPhone Texas Hold ’em app that has a few nice features, like a colored bar showing the current strength of your hand (although it doesn’t seem to adjust for the number of opponents). I’ve picked up a lot more intuition, at the very least.
I’ve played poker for play money. There’s not as much pain when losing so there is correspondingly less motivation to exercise discipline, come to correct beliefs, or deal seriously with the difficult psychological situations. Learning to take those things seriously and perform under “survival instinct”-level pressure is the point of this training. You want the actions you take to imprint your habits and reshape them to be more rational over time and play money can’t do that. See the post I linked to above for a longer explanation.
The football study you link to shows me that in cases where there’s already a rich information market, real and pretend markets both mirror it well. That doesn’t indicate to me that people wagering in the play money markets had a similar visceral experience or would learn the same lessons from failure or success. I strongly suspect they didn’t—and would bet money on it if I could figure out how.
Playing poker for play chips online quickly teaches that there’s a huge difference between $0.01 and $0.00 when it comes to quality of play. Games that don’t require something be risked end up being jokes.
I think there’s a place for it—A few months ago I didn’t know anything about poker except the relative values of the hands. Then I got a free iPhone Texas Hold ’em app that has a few nice features, like a colored bar showing the current strength of your hand (although it doesn’t seem to adjust for the number of opponents). I’ve picked up a lot more intuition, at the very least.